On Paris 2024, part I

I have been on my way all day to see the Olympic torch on its tour of Paris. I checked the website and confirmed that it will be at the Sorbonne, where I should be at around three. I was going to see an exhibition at Le Bal first and then take the ligne 13 to the other side of the Seine. I just can't get there. After seeing the Japanese photographer's pictures, which I feel I should know and have seen years ago, I stay on the terrace and have a coffee. I'm reading about Paula M. Becker and her time here in Paris around 1900, a book recommended by a writer I admire, and I can't put it down. I've read too few books about non-white male artists working here. A German curator I met yesterday, when we both visited the only house in France designed by Aalto, told me she didn't like those hybrid biographies where you don't know what the author is making up. She likes facts, she told me. Somehow that made me like this book even more. One passage mentions how Becker moved to a certain street behind Montparnasse, so I take the metro closer to that address instead.

This new itinerary even includes a walk through the cemetery, where I have visited Simone de Beauvoir's grave before. This time I visit Éric Rohmer, Brassaï and Susan Sontag and make a mental note to find out why she is buried here. I photograph their graves and flowers with my new, actually old olympus mju, which I've just bought for more money than it's worth.

Outside Becker's address a couple are bringing their bikes through the gate, and invite me in when I show them my book. Behind the normal looking entrance is a backyard full of large ateliers with high windows. The couple are not sure which one was hers, and I notice that her name was not on the plaque outside. I want to go further in, but I feel that I am only welcome for a quick sneak peek and take as many pictures as I can before thanking them profusely for allowing me to discover this secret space.

Back on the metro, I google and find the torch to be near Place des Vosges. I get off at Bastille and walk a bit up Boulevard Richard Lenoir, wondering if I should go all the way to the Bataclan to see what energy the people standing there would bring. The man next to me has a big butterfly on his shirt, almost like a pet. I decide to stay and ask if I can take a picture of it. He and his partner says oui avec plaisir and tell me that this is probably the best documented papillon in the city today. It remains on his shoulder through all the police and sponsors' cars that pass before finally a woman with a torch runs past us, surrounded by guards. She smiles as we applaud, and one of the women next to me says to her friend that it was worth waiting through all the stupid advertising vehicles as long as it was a femme running.

I walk home along the canal and then the Seine to the art residence where we live, near the Hôtel de Ville. The river, as my daughter has pointed out, looks even dirtier than it did before they cleaned it up. The clip of the Mayor of Paris swimming in it a few days ago looked painful, she even put her head under water to make a point. I wonder how long she showered afterwards. I have a glass of wine in the wine bar below my building and watch men put up more fences around the entrance down to the river. On my phone is the QR code to get around this zone, which has been dubbed grey for the opening week. The wine bar will be closed during that time, and the homeless people who usually sleep under the roof of the main building are nowhere to be seen. The promised housing outside the city has not materialised, according to several newspapers. When I think of all the money that's been spent on this whole ordeal, while I read in the same newspapers about the continuing bombardment of Gaza, I almost wish the Olympics were over before they started.

These texts relating to Paris 2024 are a work in progress.